Ballon said:
Failure ? I believe this could happen...however, how safe are we with "location" that are stocking antimatters anti-proton ? The energy magnitude is about 50x Atomic bomb matters to energy conversion when anti-matters react with their counter matters (this is very efficient)...hope that the magnets that participate on the "levitation" of the "stock" will not fail.
That is precisely why they run a huge series of extremely tough tests (well beyond what an actual collider run would involve), so that they know when they start introducing volatile materials into the ring it's going to be safe.
Also, you are grossly exaggerating the destructive power of the antimatter produced at CERN. A 1 kT explosion is equivalent to 4.2TJ of energy which is the
direct conversion of about 50 milligrams of material. While 1kT is enough to decimate CERN, typical nukes are upwards of 50kT and as high as 200MT, 200,000 times as powerful (5kg turned into energy!). The entire sum of ALL antimatter
ever made is less than 1g. To make 5kg would cost more than the entire world's GDP and while CERN has good funding, it's not
that good.
The antimatter is made pretty much on demand, stored for only a few hours or days at most (ie they don't have tanks of it sitting around right now waiting for it to be needed), and even then the quantities involves are trillions of
particles which equates to trillionths of a gram. An antimatter containment leave would cause a radiation spike and maybe a room to be destroyed, but the energies involved are less than a gallon of petrol, by several orders of magnitude.
Antimatter is just too hard to make in vast quantities to be a dangerous substance on a large scale (at present at least). More danger for CERN comes from the problem highlighted in this thread, things like the supermagnets going 'normal' and dumping their energy into heat too fast.
